Saturday, July 17, 2010

This post is inspired by recent blog post of Tomaso Dorigo, who announced finding of Higgs boson with mass of about 150 GeV. By official media coverage it's just a rumour, that's got out of hand, as expressed by Fermilab's spokes'girl. More interestingly is, what's behind this rumour - and I don't mean over imagination or exploding ego of Mr. Dorigo, as Fermilab's Twitter post implies spitefully. Or do you really believe, Fermilab would give its official stance through Twitter? Such anonymous message is even much less reliable, then the original blogpost of Mr. Dorigo. But such way of prematurely presentation of results and their vetoing indicates, how mainstream physics maneuvers between less or more opened tendency to announce findings as soon as possible for the sake of publicity and/or grant support ex una parte - and the demonstrative expression of conservative skepticism on the other hand.

IMO Higgs boson is the same fuzzy unparticle stuff, like the virtual bosons responsible for Casimir force - their effective mass depends on surface geometry. Just at the case of Higgs boson the upper bound is limited by mass of top quark, so it can form a fuzzy signal, corresponding the dilepton channel of top quark decay, which was observed already. If even more massive quark exists, then its corresponding Higgs should indeed exist too and the whole concept of unique "God's particle" becomes fringe.

Mr. Dorigo himself putted the nail into coffin of Higgs boson by his previous announcement of fourth generation of quarks in 450 GeV range. Before finding of neutrino oscillation, the Standard Model contained 19 arbitrary dimensionless constants describing the masses of the particles and the strengths of the electroweak and strong forces. After the discovery of neutrino mass the new Standard Model requires 26 fundamental dimensionless constants, whose numerical values are, to the best of present understanding, arbitrary. Currently Standard Model is indeed incompatible with fourth generation of quarks or neutrinos, but thanks so high number of constants flexible enough to implement even higher particle generations. It's sort of regressive epicycle model keeping the Ptolemaic physics of modern era alive.

We can say, this finding is of approximatelly the same relevance like the previous finding of Higgs boson anounced (about three sigma in error level). And quess what? In this time the blog article was handled by NewScientist quite seriously and it got full coverage in media. The whole trick here is, most of physicists actually do not believe in concept of Higgs boson on background - despite the massive propaganda in CERN related media, the main purpose is to justify expensive experiments at LHC.

The title of recent another NewScientist article "In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for" (full version) illustrates clearly, physicists are aware of the conceptual problems of Higgs field concept. The article should be interpreted like: "Uhm, well, ... we actually don't believe, Higgs boson will be ever found at LHC - so we should concentrate to supersymmetry instead. ."

With respect to AdS/CFT duality the success or problems with particle search at Planck scale will be replicated/mirrored at cosmological scales (WIMPs detection) and vice-versa. Therefore it's not so strange, when dual situation recently appeared in media, when scientists started to speculate, (primordial) gravitational waves cannot be found at all due the "quantum-spread", which would render detectors of gravitational waves useless in the same way, like the LHC at quantum scale.

This is an example, how seemingly spontaneous scientific PR is basically working - layman public should trace subliminal messages of it for to get the realistic picture about opinion of this close sectarian community in the noise of PR journalism and propaganda.